My dog died.

So I was driving to work this morning, and a spider tried to land on my arm. And I have this respect for life which promted me to try to get it to go out the window instead of just squishing it, an effort in which I'd just succeeded when I jumped the curb and hit a telephone pole, completely totalling my car. That car had been in the family for 15 years, it's what I learned to drive on, and I feel like I just killed a relative. Next time the spider's going to get it.

Physically, I survived mostly unharmed; I've been adding to the list of minor injuries as the day goes on, but it's all little stuff: my knees got scraped and bruised hitting the steering column, (but I've done worse falling off my bicycle as a kid) my wrist is a bit scraped, I'm not really sure from what, there's an impressive bruise on my hip where the seatbelt caught me, (they kept asking me "were you wearing your seatbelt" and I wanted to say, "don't be stupid, of course I was, look, there isn't a huge hole in the drivers side of the windshield where my head went through, look, I'm not in the hospital, look, it's only my car that's bleeding its guts out all over the street") and of course my head hurts because I was bursting into tears at ten minute intervals all morning.

Everyone's been terribly nice to me, as well. Fortunately Virtue hadn't left for work and wasn't in the shower when I called her on a borrowed cell phone this morning, and she came straight out and talked to the police and towing people for me, and provided extra plastic bags to get all the important stuff out of the corpse before they towed it away. My parents are bringing me a car on friday which I'll be able to use until I get a new one, so I don't even have to beg for a ride out to faire when it opens on saturday. And I was just starting to work on this when Optimus showed up in my doorway to make sure I was ok, and take me out to lunch. (People keep trying to feed me things. I don't understand-- my depressive reaction is not to be hungry...)

But then, people (ones who don't know me so well) keep trying to console me that here is the great oportunity to buy some nice new car. And I don't want a new car. I've been saying for years now that my perfect car would be exactly like Cerberus, only brand new, with a cruise control and an intermittent setting on the windshield wipers. Only today I think I've added that my perfect car would not have spiders in it.

When we got the car in 1987 (a little white '86 toyota corolla with black racing stripes) it didn't have a side-view mirror on the passenger side. So my father went out to the auto parts store & got a cheap mirror to put on, only it never stayed in place, and eventually he got tired of alternately adjusting it and looking at the sky instead of the side of the road, so he got the official toyota one and put that on instead. Only no one ever got around to taking the extra mirror off, and I (long before I ever thought of being a classics major) looked at it and said, "It's got three heads! It must be Cerberus."

It's true that he was slowly dying. He hit 162,000 miles last Saturday. (The title was signed over to me in January of 2001, with about 143,000) The engine was starting to die occationally at times when I was out of gear before I'd driven too far (stoplights, slow turns with the clutch in) and no one at my garage was able to duplicate the problem, so they had no idea what it was or how to fix it. He'd had lost a noticeable amount of power in the last six months. And the last time he needed a major part, that had to be shipped in from Japan, because they didn't make them in the US anymore. So yes, it was only a matter of time.

But he deserved a better end than this, I think. The pole hit somewhere around the middle of the passenger side headlight, and sheered off straight back to the tire, which snapped its axle and bent at a 90 degree angle to where it was supposed to be, while we spun around and kept going and ended up essentially facing the oposite direction in the middle of the road. I had to tear the plastic on the glove box to get it open far enough to get my insurance information out. The passenger side window is adding little sparkles to the road dust. And all for some stupid spider.

My boss tried to tell me (when I called in to say I wasn't going to be at work today) that at least I survived, and the spider probably did. Personally, I hope it got hit by a flying shard of glass and died a messy death. Except that I'm fairly sure it didn't, as it would have been protected by the bulk of the car...

So I don't have much left here, of the second most expensive thing I own. (my sewing machine is the first, though this, of course, is about to change) The second side-view mirror snapped off against the pole, and I brought it home sort of like an urn, and there are a few shards of broken platic (part of the side turn-signal light that I picked up at the time and then didn't put down again all morning, the mirror from behind the headlight that was nearly intact...) plus all the stuff that's lived in the trunk for years: jumper cables, a set of wrenches, duct tape, first aid kit... all the receipts for all the repairs we've ever had done on the car, and the gas & mileage record notebooks... I wanted to keep the whole thing. But what would I do with a car so smashed in you couldn't even get it to roll? This is just me being stupid and sentimental.

(hm, the bruise from the seatbelt is now telling me it goes all the way across my middle...)

I don't even have any pictures... So here is what I have done, by way of memorium. About two years ago, I wrote a story about Cerberus, as dog-turned-car, and I'm posting it here under Small Crimes of Fiction, because at least that's doing something. And it's better than going out looking for a new car before the old one's even buried...

...or so says Thanate.

adding another line to the list of the stupidest things I've ever done